Autodesk Arnold 6 renders on CPU and GPU
Autodesk has announced the release of Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU. From look development to final frame rendering, Arnold 6 with the Arnold GPU simplifies how artists and studios create content. Arnold’s intuitive interface makes it easy to toggle between CPU and GPU rendering, maintaining the same settings with a single click. Arnold GPU is based on NVIDIA’s OptiX framework and optimised to take advantage of NVIDIA RTX technology. This ability allows managers to scale rendering capacity to accommodate the ebbs and flows of the production.
First unveiled as a beta release in March, Arnold 6 completes the Arnold GPU toolset with improvements across lights, shaders, and cameras, as well as on-demand texture loading and support for Open Shading Language (OSL) and OpenVDB volumes. Additionally, as part of Autodesk’s continued efforts to accelerate the adoption of open standards, a collection of components for Arnold in the USD ecosystem is now available online. Also, the Hydra render delegate, Arnold USD procedural, and USD schemas for Arnold nodes and properties are now available on GitHub.
“Rendering workloads continue to grow as content providers strive to meet rising audience expectations for content quality. Speed and interactivity have become more crucial than ever to the creative process. Arnold 6 delivers performance gains that will help lighten the load with the same high-quality render results that the CPU renderer is known for,” said Chris Vienneau, senior director, Media & Entertainment Products, Autodesk. “We’ve worked closely with NVIDIA to optimize Arnold GPU to run on the latest RTX GPUs and RTX Server, and we’re excited to get this latest update into the hands of new and existing Arnold customers.”
Arnold 6’s Unified Renderer lets the user switch seamlessly between CPU and GPU rendering. The Arnold GPU now supports OSL, OpenVDB volumes, on-demand texture loading, most LPEs, lights, shaders, and all cameras. GPU noise is now also on par with CPU noise when using adaptive sampling, which has been improved to generate even faster, more predictable results regardless of the renderer used.
Arnold 6 with Arnold GPU is available as a standalone subscription or with a collection of end-to-end creative tools within the Autodesk Media & Entertainment Collection. For the first time, monthly, annual, and three-year single-user subscriptions of Arnold are available on the Autodesk e-store. Arnold GPU is also available to try with a free 30-day trial of Arnold 6. Arnold GPU is available in all supported plug-ins for Autodesk Maya, Autodesk 3ds Max, Houdini, Cinema 4D, and Katana.
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